Flood button for weight painting
Hello,
sorry, my first post got deleted because I deleted my account by mistake. So here it is again.
I work as a lead rigger for a team and assistant technical director ( 30ppl in the team, 3 riggers ) We use maya, so I use Maya every day, but I LOVE blender. So for personnel project, I love coming back to Blender. The quality of the viewport with Eevee and Cycle is just amazing.
But there are some aspect of the pipeline were Blender is a bit rough. And weight painting is one of them. It feels old and it's not user friendly.
So I would like to help blender improve in this field. Sadly, I don't know enough scripting to do it myself.
So the first thing that I believe blender needs for a good weight painting system is:
A Flood tool
it should do:
1- use my brush setting (the mode, the weight and the strength) to be applied at once to the whole geometry or if vertex are selected, to the selection.
2- this tool HAS TO auto-normalize when the option is checked but also taking account of the weights that are locked. For now, the only way you can use the auto-normalize feature is by painting manually the geometry. But it's time consuming and super awkward when some vertex are hidden.
3- this flood feature should be available for the brush, but also for the blur tool that seems to act like a smooth tool. I use a smooth tool with flood constantly in maya.
Some might direct me to the "Set Weight" feature, but this feature is not really useful for now. It just set the weight of the selected vertex to the weight that I have not even taking account the auto normalize. And you can only set the weight, you can't do a multiply or a substract or any other mode... so the "Set weight" is exactly like selecting the vertex, setting a weight value in the Vertex group and clicking on assign.
I heard that we should avoid referencing other software to help blender improve, but a plugin that we use and changed my way of skinPainting is ngskintools.com/ so if we can bring blender closer to this way of weight painting, that would be awesome.
Thank you for checking my request. Cheers, Mathias.
3 Comments
a work around for now is to use the gradient tool somewhere facing away from the model so that the entire object is on the high value side of the gradient. Not ideal but it works
I didn't know this trick, interesting. But again the gradient tool doesn't take into account the auto normalize. So you get something you like and then you normalize and often the shape changes.
Edit, in fact the gradient tool seems to use the auto-normalize, but it is still quite rough to use.
For those who are interested, the 2 main features that I love about ngskintools are
1- the layers. you can create layers on top of others and then paint an opacity mask to mix them together.
2- A feature to see all the weights value at once with different colors. It uses random colors something like 10 of them, and apply them to different groups. And white is the active group that we are painting one. Sometimes the same color is used for 2 adjacent group so it's difficult to see the difference, but then you can click to randomize again the colors and the groups.